Walk through the halls of higher education administration these days and you will notice a peculiar phenomenon: universities are rapidly creating, elevating, and expanding the roles of Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and similar executive positions. The message from institutional leadership is clear and consistent. These roles are necessary. They are modern. They are what competitive universities do.
This trend is being sold as inevitable. It deserves more skepticism than it is getting.
Do not misunderstand the argument. Technology in higher education has real value. Online learning platforms, data analytics, and digital infrastructure matter. Universities genuinely need people who understand how to deploy these tools effectively. That is not the question.
The question is whether the answer to these legitimate needs is always a new C-suite position with expanding authority and budget. Whether the impulse to elevate technologists into top leadership reflects genuine institutional strategy or a reflexive genuflection to the mythology of disruption. Whether universities are solving problems or performing solutions.
Consider what happens when an institution creates a prominent CIO role. Suddenly, technology becomes positioned as something separate from the university's core mission rather than embedded within it. The CIO becomes a fiefdom unto themselves. Faculty are cast as resistors to change rather than collaborators in it. Innovation becomes something imposed from above rather than cultivated across the institution. Everyone points to the CIO's title and concludes that the university is taking technology seriously, even if nothing fundamental has changed about how faculty teach or students learn.
This mirrors a broader pattern in higher education administration: the belief that structural solutions can substitute for genuine cultural change.
We see it in the proliferation of new offices and new titles designed to address problems that are fundamentally human and pedagogical in nature. A new VP of Student Success does not necessarily improve student success. A new office for diversity and inclusion does not guarantee inclusive outcomes if the institution lacks the will to change. Similarly, a new Chief Innovation Officer does not ensure that innovation actually happens.
What it does ensure is that someone holds the title. What it does create is a new layer of bureaucracy. What it often produces is turf wars and accountability diffusion.
The real work of innovation in higher education happens in classrooms and laboratories. It happens when faculty experiment with peer-assisted learning models. It happens when institutions make genuine investments in training existing IT staff to evolve with changing technological landscapes rather than constantly hiring externally. It happens through the hard, unglamorous work of institutional change that does not generate press releases.
Universities struggling with technology adoption would benefit more from examining why their existing structures are failing than from adding new positions to their org chart. Do faculty lack training in digital pedagogy? Provide training. Do students need better support in online learning environments? Redesign student support. Do departments lack resources to implement new systems? Allocate resources. These solutions require money and commitment. They do not always require new executives.
The danger of the Chief Innovation Officer trend is not that it brings bad people into institutions. The danger is that it permits institutions to feel as though they have addressed a problem while often leaving the underlying issues intact. It creates the appearance of action without requiring the substance of change. It allows a university to say "we have a CIO" the way a medical school might say "we have a diversity officer" and then feel as though they have done something meaningful.
If universities are serious about integrating technology thoughtfully into their missions, they need to ask harder questions. What specific problems are we trying to solve? Can existing structures solve them if we invest properly? What are we actually trying to change about how we educate students? Does a new executive position help or hinder that work?
These questions are harder than simply creating a new job. They deserve to be asked anyway.